The Crane Wife(30)
Author: Patrick Ness

‘And why not?’

‘I do not require anyone’s forgiveness, and neither do I recognise your authority to offer it.’

‘The authority to offer it is given by he who asks.’

He smiles at her, his eyes bright. ‘This does not contradict me, my lady.’

11 of 32

Guided by a feeling she declines to recognise, she swoops down low over the volcano’s advancing army. It has encountered another and, up close, it is impossible to tell which side is which. The battle is nothing more than a twisting, spattering pan of butchery, turned in on itself to boil and burn.

She sweeps back up and around, circling the volcano for a last time.

‘Before you leave, my lady,’ says the volcano. ‘I wonder if you will tell me your name.’ He smiles again, and reflected in his eyes the world is dying in fire and terror. ‘So that I may call it to you when you next see me.’

‘I will not see you again.’

‘As you wish, my lady,’ the volcano says, bowing his head at her. ‘Yet I will tell you mine.’ He opens his mouth and a roar of pain and mischief is hurled from it. The leaves on nearby trees curl up just to hear it, birds fall from the skies, black locusts spiral from cracks in the ground.

‘But you, my lady,’ says the volcano, ‘may call me–’

‘I shall not call you anything,’ she says, ready to fly away, but not leaving, not just yet. She says, for the second time, ‘I will not see you again.’

The volcano says, also for a second time, ‘As you wish, my lady.’

He raises his whip, but she is gone before it lands.

12 of 32

‘Father?’ she says, flying through the clouds. She knows he will not answer. He never has, not at any point as the world has grown older. She neither knows nor in fact believes that he might be out there listening to her, for a cloud shifts and gathers and rains itself out many times over the course of a single day let alone a world’s lifetimes, and even the daughter of a cloud cannot tell one from another.

They might be her father. They might just be clouds. They are not her father. They are clouds.

Yet still, ‘Father?’ she says.

She says nothing further, unsure of what her question might be. Her head is filled with the volcano, with arguments they have never had, defeats of him she has never achieved, the final sweet forgiveness she can offer as she grants him his last wish of a release he has not asked for.

She flies through the clouds, letting the drops of moisture cool her brow, wet her clothes in sweet relief, soothe the aching muscles of her flying.

All the while, her father watches her, whispering her name only when she has finally left the clouds and is too far away to hear it.

George began to dream strange things.

Kumiko still wouldn’t let him see her work, would still barely let him past the front door of the small flat where she lived – which didn’t matter so much as she was almost always at George’s now anyway – but he began to dream of locked doors and knowing she was beyond them, knowing also that the locks were only there at her request and his observance of that request. He could look any time he chose. But in his dreams, he stayed behind the door. In agony.

Or he dreamed of finding her in a secret white room with no locks, gathering feathers to herself in the shape of a woman, draping and trimming long white wings back into arms and fingers, disguising a beak behind her nose, putting pale brown contact lenses over her golden, golden eyes. When she saw him watching her, she wept for him, for all they were about to lose.

Or he dreamed of fire, rising up through the earth, spilling out in seams of lava, chasing him, with her running behind, but in the dream he could never be sure whether she was running from the fire, too, or if she was leading it to him, so that it could swarm down and consume him.

When he woke, he forgot every fact of the dreams, but a residue of unease remained.

And began to accumulate.

The first purchase he made with the tile money was a massive new printer for the shop.

‘Not a raise for me?’ Mehmet asked, arms huffily folded.

‘And a raise for you,’ George said, watching the delivery men move the printer into place.

‘How much?’

‘Pound an hour.’

‘That’s it?’

George turned to him. ‘Pound-fifty?’

Mehmet looked as if he was about to protest, but then his face broke into a disbelieving smile. ‘How have you made it this far in life, George? How do you not get eaten alive by the world out there?’

‘I do okay,’ George said, his eyes back on the printer.

It didn’t gleam; its parts were plastic and its rollers looked like what they were, cogs in an enormous piece of industrial machinery. But oh, it did gleam. In his heart’s eye, it gleamed. It was faster than George’s old printer, but that was just a technical point. Its colours were more vibrant. The sheens and complex texture combinations it could do were almost laughably luxuriant. Its programming could re-adjust itself in an instant, faster than an instant, could anticipate your coming instant and do what you wanted before you even asked.

It was everything George had ever wanted for his shop.

And it had paid for itself from the art that hung above it. Art that Kumiko mostly made but for which she insisted his part was vital, and for which she continued to give him half.

Which was turning out to be half of quite a lot. After they’d sold the second tile – of the closed hand beside the profile of the face – to the woman brought in by the first buyer, they’d sold a third and a fourth within the week to friends of those first two buyers. Despite being obviously moneyed and occasionally intimidatingly cool, neither of the new buyers had seemed to want the tiles out of any sense of fashion – how could they, the tiles were far too new – but instead behaved with the same sort of desperate longing the first buyers had shown. One, a creative accounts exec who wore an expensive black tie over an expensive black shirt under an expensive black blazer, had said almost nothing beyond a whispered ‘Yes’ as he gazed on the newest tile, which showed Kumiko’s feathered horses plummeting down a hill towards a river of George’s words, before handing over a large wad of bills to the scandalised Mehmet.

Then someone, presumably one of the buyers, had tipped off a small but influential online arts journal, which had featured a brief interview with George – but not Kumiko, who had asked him to please be whatever sort of public face the tiles might need – as a ‘potential rising star’, and before the end of that week they’d not only had a number of enquiries to buy the at-that-point still-unfinished fifth tile, but also offers of initial meetings and even representation from different art dealers.